General Election 2018

I dunno if I woud want to take over being The Government until after the Brexit is fully done. Poison fkn chalice. Much better to come in just after when you can blame everything on Someone Else.

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What…or who? I think you mean Pap. :lou_wink_2:

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June 2018 a triumphant Corbyn stands on the steps of No.10, addresses the assembled media for the first time and says, “Finally! I can now start to repair all the damage done to this country… by Pap”

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We know that vote counting can take a long long time bear. If they get voting in spring, by the time all the votes are counted and processed and meeting with Bletch has happened etc, Brexit will have already be over with. Ireland will be united again, soft cheese will be made illegal and all beer will be 4.5%.

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That woud be quite bad too tho. I mean, if Corbyn won the general election and he was all celebrating, goes to No. 10 but Theresa May refuses to answer the door, and then finally months later she’s just like, no, I’m still government but you can make suggestions bout the future direction of the country or whatever. Just write them all down, post them in nearest bin, see what happens.

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As much as I would hate Corbyn anywhere near the tiller, I would fear John McDonnell more.

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i think this is a pretty neat+funny summary of the Last Election for contexts:

Edit: It is Old News but I only just seen it so maybe you missed it too rip

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Do you remember the last three chancellors, including the incumbent? :lou_sunglasses:

Exactly, when you are trying to put out a fire, you don’t use petrol.

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Sorry mucker, these fuckers never had a clue about running an economy that works. They’ve all presided over a scenario in which in individual can hold down a full time job and still not have enough money to live on without further assistance , in which two million people are in a state of permanent overdraft.

The policy choices they’ve made have been fucking useless. There’s an old rule. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Most other developed countries can get away with charging around 26% corporation tax. I was certainly happy to pay it back in the day. What the fuck did the Tories fix by taking that money out of the economy?

Raising the Personal Allowance is another thing the neoliberals love to crow about.

“We’ve taken more people out of tax!”, they say.

The problem is, to win that prize in the last “giveaway”, you have to be earning less than £11.8k, and more than £11.5k. Those are the only people “taken out of tax” with the new threshold.

If you earn less, you were already out of tax, you lucky lucky £221 a week bastard.

The truth is that it’s a tax break for everybody which means almost fuck all to anybody, _unless _it’s pooled collectively. Billions lost from the exchequer over the year. Weekly to the individual, it’s just shy of two quid a week.

Indefensible policy when you actually break it down.

And you worry about someone who actually fancies a structured economy.

Or cyclohexanol. That’s the only thing I learned from A level chemistry.

Hang on a mo, in 2010 the personal allowance was 6475, now after a number of progressive changes,it will be almost 12k. Are you saying that this has been a shit policy?

BTW if is not a tax break for everybody. Once you hit a certain income, you lose the Personal allowance

I’m a bit confuzzlecas to what McDonald would actually do. He said he’d nationalise PFI contracts and then said only some. He said he’d pay off all student debt but seems to have pulled back from that. He said he’d renationalise the railways and then seemed to pull back from that. I’m not saying these are bad policies - just that he seems to like to give the impression of one thing but when pressed, things aren’t how they might have appeared.

You are going to get a “bless” from pap for that one

I prefer to call him McDonald (it was autocorrect, honest guv) so every time I see him I can go e-i-e-i-o

It’s an utterly shit policy.

You are correct that those earning over 100k lose it gradually. That’s 1m people out of 30m taxpayers. It’s not a lot of people. It’s a tax break for the vast majority of taxpayers. It’s still billions lost to the exchequer, still almost fuck all to the individual.

I think everyone should pay income tax, It gives people a sense of ownership in their society, and if wages were set appropriately, it’s no problem. Those billions could be used on public services.

Taking the personal tax allowance in its entirety, discounting those north of £100k, that is £66 billion a year to the exchequer, or £2,360 to the individual. I’m not saying that sum is not substantial.

I simply argue that more of the cost should be borne from the companies that thrive here, and that £66 billion might be better spent on reducing the tax we pay after our take home has been calculated.

I seem to recall as they started to raise the personal allowance they squeezed the higher rate limit mean8n* anyone paying 40% tax was broadly neutral. So it was a giveaway but only to the lower paid. Also anyone earning minimum wage in full time employment is paying tax. If they work 35 hours a week they earn 13650. They will pay roughly £400 in tax. How much do you want them to pay?

They can pay the full £2360.

Their employers can pay them better than poverty wages so they don’t lose out.

The workers are better off, public funds are better off. The only community that loses out is the business community, who let’s face it, have operated on increasingly favourable terms since 1979.

I can live with that. It’s time they paid their share. And if, as is often posited, they fuck off to other countries to escape paying a bit of tax, I’m sure there will be other companies prepared to pay a living wage and financially fit enough to know how to do it.

It’s a market north of 60m people, after all.

That works out at a minimum wage of £13 - reckon that might be somewhat inflationary

There are levers you can pull to reduce costs across the board. Fuel duty affects business and consumers, and is baked into the price of everything. That might be a short term lever to reduce inflation.

There are long term infrastructure decisions you can make to reduce them too. More efficient transport networks, less traffic on the roads, less pollution in the cities, less maintenance.

You cannot do that if you’re selling vast sums of the public purse for cheap political soundbites, or to benefit your friends that run large corporations, which is exactly what the last few chancellors have done.